Time muddled itself as I floated through a different type of void than before. There was no longer any body attached to me as I tried to sort through my feelings and figure out where I was. I was…a rock? No, I was a stone. A shard that was so sharp and black it felt like I was cutting through the reality of the void around me. if I was about to fade into the unknown it seemed kinda stange to me that the one thing I could still feel was the small shard that had been shoved through my heart, but it wasn't so simple. I was now the shard itself, stuck in the void and lost from my body.
I was repulsed by the feeling. I wanted my body back, and I searched through the black that surrounded me, desperate to get any sense of feeling back. Instead, I found a song that whispered its notes into my soul, painting a picture for my mind.
I looked down to see a cube of solid rock, trapping what looked like a young girl's body that lay asleep in the grave. Her arms were crossed and her eyes were closed as her mouth hang open in one final gasp for air that never came to her. It was me. Had been me. She was clearly not breathing, and somehow I had a feeling that there was no life in her body just from the essence in my gut. But yet, I was looking down on myself, clearly conscious in some form or fashion. And now I had absolutely no sense of what to do next.
Nothing outside of the cube was visible to me, even though it felt like I was an outsider looking down on the situtation. With a bit of effort i found that i could reposition my viewpoint from the top down, to the bottom up, to a side view of my body, but still there was nothing else to see outside of the immediate viscinity of my corpse.
'Not much good being a ghost if I'm stuck in a coffin.' I thought to myself, 'Maybe this is why ghosts are always such assholes when they finally get free.'
So after trying and failing to see anything outside of my small little world, I instead started to look inward. My body was clearly a mess by this point. My chest was practically painted over with blood that stained the thin white sheet that served as a dress pink down to my hip bones. Most of the blood seemed to be coming from my fingertips, which was surprising to me considering the massive black shard that was piercing through my chest hadn't yet drawn any obvious blood at all.
Focusing on the shard, I had a strange sense of self in the object, like I was looking at myself in the mirror. Staring into the shard gave me a strange sense of feeling too, like if I looked into the inky depths of the razor edge for too long the world started to take a different hue to it, and I casually accepted whatever was happening. Perhaps I was just exhausted from spending several hours struggling against my own death, but I soon realized that the shard itself sang a slightly different song than the one I could hear in the depths of the void, and I listened.
White started to fill my vision as my body and the stone around it started to fade away from my perception. The white slowly condensed itself into the shape of a rib cage, and then continued to fill out the void moving away from the black shard. A set of hip bones faded into view, then my arm and leg bones sprouted from the torso as though shining a light onto a long dead cadaver, quickly followed by a skull, hands, and feet. As the rest of my body solidified into view for me, I started to notice more white blobs in the distance.
It started as strange indications of white that looked like small pots in the distance, but quickly expanded into a wide range of stars that were consolidated on the horizon. A faint couple of the stars seemed to exists far below my body, yet the majority of the small pools of white light started to fill in the sightline all around me, growing brighter and brighter with time. Eventually, my field of vision to every side turned a brilliant white that was blinding against the darkness above me where not a single star shone in the sky. As I continued to feel more and more objects pop into my vision, even when I could no longer visibly see them among the sea of white, the pain in my head started to grow.
Perhaps I was still used to having a body at the time, so I tried to shut my eyes against the pain and surprisingly everything winked out at once, leaving me alone with the shard yet again.
'Huh', I hadn't really expected that to work. The pain was gone, and I was back in my own little pocket of nothing.
This time, I opened my eyes slowly, only barely squinting in the direction of the shard as it started to fill in my skeleton again, and then stopped there without expanding to the stars. Curious, I willed myself closer to the skeleton as I took stock of the situation and what I was in for now that I must be a ghost. Small cracks shone across my shin bones and wrists from…well to be honest I really couldn't remember. Otherwise, the only other major problem with the skeleton seemed to be the tips of my fingers that had been clawing at my cage so pointlessly.
My finger tips looked strangly worn down, even in bone form, which was fairly concerning to myself considering how the blood had been covering the wound's severity up until now. Somehow i had a strong sense of wrongness as I looked down on those fingers, and started to imagine what they must look like on a normal body.
With that small little intention of mine, the song of the shard seemed to buzz in my ears as the finger tips resonated and vibrated under my view. Surprised, my mind quickly backed off from what I was thinking about and looked back at the shard, which immediately cut off the strange buzzing and stilled my dulled fingertips.
Nothing seemed to be wrong with the shard when I stopped thinking about my bones, so I went back to what I was doing without overly worrying about the strange piece of darkeness that seemed to capture my soul. I once again thought of fixing the broken lines at the edges of my finger tips, and this time the shard trully buzzed with excitement. My fingers seemed to vibrate in place, growing both in the intensity with which i could see them, but also inheriting a sense of warmth. The cracks at the edges slowly started to fill in as the bone resumed its natural shape before my eyes.
My essence took a step back from the situation and the buzzing stoped as I looked at my handiwork. 'I'm now a ghost who can regrow my own bones?' I thought to myself, and that gave me an idea.
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The shard buzzed its song of darkness as I set my mind to the task at hand. An assortment of bones that made up my hand started to rise into the air as I simply willed it to lift up, and it did. Slightly impressed with myself I tried to make my hand wave at me at which point the assortment of bones kind of just quivered back and forth awkwardly in the air. Maybe i just didn't have the right sense of control yet, so I started using my imagination to bend the individual fingers in and out of a fist. This seemed easy enough as I pulled my finger tips in to touch the thickest part of my knuckle bones and quickly felt something go wrong and the fingers went limp.
From my current view everything seemed virtually unchanged, but a strange curdling from the shard gave me the distinct impression that it might have been laughing at me. I looked around myself in confusion and the bone vision quickly bleeded away as I started to see my full body fade into view again within the coffin. The hand I had been playing with remained upright as it seems like I had leaned it against the wall of my tomb before I let go of the bone sight, but then I quickly saw what had gone wrong. Blood virtually pooled out of a newly opened wound along the palm of my hand as I realized what I had just done.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
The tips of my newly restored finger tips shone white and slightly protruded from the skin at the edge of my fingers, which was greusome enough, but now the fingers hung limply across the inside of my hand as though I had cut off the only thing supporting them up before. it dawned on me that by closing the bones together too tightly into a fist, I had just cut through my own palm using the pressure of the bones closing together. And to top it all off the view was absolutely disgusting.
Perhaps it was for the better that I was dead already when I found my ghost abilities because I would have probably passed out from the pain in my hand. Instead, i found that I could still feel a sort of something as I looked down on my body, but it was so muted it was like staring at an object at the bottom of a pool of water. Perhaps I could make out that what I was feeling was pain, but it was so indistinct and blurry from my point of view that it felt like a sense of pressure more than anything else.
I reeled at the sight of the injury caused by my own experimentation, but all that awaited me was time itself. I could scream into the void with all my might, but the only lungs I had were attached to a body that wasn’t fully mine anymore. I was stuck. And although everything in me wanted to curl up into a ball and just sit there, at this point even that didn’t really seem like much of an option. My vision flashed to white as I once again focused on the inside of my old body and got to work.
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Using my new powers to ball my hand into a fist, I then turned my attention to slowly raising my arm up and down, bit by bit. The trouble wasn’t so much that it was physically taxing to do this, but I was also trying to make sure the entire arm didn’t just rip itself away from the shoulder socket at the same time. Perhaps it was a blessing that I was starting this new life in a small confined box with nothing to do but figure things out, although I still wasn't very happy with the fact that I had just died in here.
One test after another, I started to get comfortable moving my arm up and down without too much stress about the mechanism of things. Unfortunately, I had also just realized a new plan that was going to put all of my patience to waste. After spending some time truly thinking about it, I couldn't think of anything better to do and started working my way out of this hell hole using these new powers.
Fist once again balled up in my otherworldly sight, i started to thrust my arm up into the ceiling of my new prison where i had been trying to claw away at the seams back when I was still living. It was not a pretty sight as I immediately started to see cracks spread throughout the knuckles of my fist and the buzzing of phantom pain sprouted in my head. In between punches I set myself to not only recovering those minute cracks, but soon started to improvise a bit and willed my knuckles into being just a little bit more angular than they used to be.
Rock rained down around my body as I continued hammering away at the one location over and over. Each new thrust gave me a second to think about how I could make a better tool, and I slowly began knitting the knuckle bones together allong the width of my hand while also extending out the sharp edge just a little bit farther into something that resembled more of a punching dagger before I was truly satisfied.
Punch, rest, punch, rest, punch, rest. Thwak! Crack!
The barest hint of light shone through the tiny seam I had made in the ceiling of my coffin, not the direct shine of sunlight, but still some ambient light was more than I had seen for quite some time. Finally feeling progress, my punches hardly slowed as I continued the process to widen the gap. The buzz of pain that seeped into my soul had slowed down considerably after I had formed the punching dagger, and I could now make several strikes in a row before stopping to mend over the cracks in my bones at this point. Self conscious of what I had probably already done to my poor hand, I refused to transfer my sight to the flesh based variant, so at worst when I looked down at myself it looked like your average skeleton other than the oversized fist weapon pointed at the ceiling.
Internally I shook my head as I continued to work my way out, the hole growing wider by the second. First it was wide enough for a fist to escape, then the size of my head, and soon it looked just about wide enought to squeeze my shoulders through before I stopped working at the hole. Then i realized just how awkward learning how to sit up as an undead body was going to be.
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Minutes likely turned into hours as I tried learning how to manipulate the bones in my spine to sit myself up without any muscle control. It was at this point that I started to get a better grasp on what I was doing with the power was less related to actually moving the bones themselves up and down, and more related to the minute elongation and shortening of the bones in order to make it look like movement. Pretty soon my spine had more or less slithered its way into an upright position with my back hunched under the hole in the ceiling when I started to move my arms upward to drape them outside of the hole first.
Piece by piece, I was starting to exit my prison into what looked to be a small crypt with an open door to the outside world when I was surprised to see a skeleton casually walk through the open door. My entire body stilled, uncertain what I might look like, half jutting from a broken open stone coffin when the walking bones came to a stop right next to the hole I was making my way out of.
"Well shit, I thought you would have figured out how to get out of here by now, and you're still squirming around like a headless snake.", came a hoarse low voice.
Hearing the words spoken aloud even in my bone sight finally reminded me that this was probably just a man who had walked into my forlorn crypt and not in fact a walking skeleton like me. Still, it was strange that he was so comfortable with the idea of a corpse breaking out of her cage like nothing out of the ordinary had happened. While I was still coming to terms with the situation, the man grabed me by the wrists and casually lifted my body out of the hole until I drooped like a cat in front of his face. I finally decided to shift my sight away from the bones themselves to take in the moment and immediately regretted the decision.
A grizzled old man with long black hair and a tightly braided beard stared down at me from sunken eyes. He was obviously more than a foot taller than i had been in life judging by the ease with which he had me lifted by the arms to hover in the air as he looked me over. As for myself, things weren't looking so good as it was obvious i had numerous open wounds all across my body. Dark brown crusted blood matted my arm tipped with a digustingly white shark tooth head where my fist was supposed to be. But not only that, my shoulder hung limp like it was barely connected by the skin to the rest of my body at this point, allong with several red splotches lining up the center of my spine where i had snaked my way into an upright position.
More concerning than that, I think my body had more or less started to run out of blood as my skin glowed an unearthly pale hue in the ambient light from the doorway. Desipte the state of my current body, I started to hope that the man actually knew me already based on his first introduction and the fact he didn't seem surprised to find me. That was, until he let get of my arms and I dropped to the ground like a sack of potatoes.
"Disgusting, this is what you really look like?", the man muttered as he made his way outside.
Confused, surprised, and more than a little hurt by his reaction I tried yelling at the man, yet nothing came out except for empty screams into the void as I looked down at my crumpled body. Seething as I was, I dove back into the bone sight to try and follow the man as I quickly extended my arms to grasp the thin grooves in the stone that made up the room's floor and then pulled as best that I could to try and drag the rest of my body. It kind of worked, except that my body was being pulled lopsided towards only one of the arms as the hand with the punch dagger constricted with seemingly no effect on the rest of my bones.
Oh. My shoulder ripped off.
Even more frustrated now, the buzz in my head was starting to become hard to ignore at this point as I used my only remaining arm to flip my body over to its back and angled my head towards the door. Hardly trusting myself to walk without losing my legs at this point I merely tried using my knee joints to start pushing my body foot by foot towards the door and the outside world.